The Nation

The Nation is a weekly magazine published by the Nation Institute. First published in 1865, The Nation is headquartered in New York, N.Y. It is the oldest weekly magazine in the U.S. to be continually published. The Nation also has bureaus in London and South Africa.Self-described as "the flagship for the left," The Nation focuses on the topics of politics and culture. Contributors of note have included Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr., Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens, Hunter S. Thompson, Langston Hughes, Ralph Nader, Leon Trotsky, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John Steinbeck, John Maynard Keynes and Naomi Klein. The Nation has broken such notable stories as the Valerie Plane leak scandal in 2003 and several articles about the Whitewater scandal in the 1990s. It was the first U.S. publication to report on what would become the Bay of Pigs invasion. The Nation has won 24 National Magazine Awards since 1971. Katrina vanden Heuvel is Editor and Publisher. Roane Carey is Managing Editor, John Palattella is Literary Editor, Betsy Reed is Executive Editor, and Richard Lingeman and Richard Kim are Senior Editors.

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Articles from Vol. 276, No. 14, April 14

A Stone Unturned

IN THIS ESSAY Bay of Souls. By Robert Stone. Houghton Mifflin. 249 pp. $25. A Hall of Mirrors. By Robert Stone. Houghton Mifflin. 409 pp. Paper $12. Dog Soldiers. By Robert Stone. Houghton Mifflin. 342 pp. Paper $13. A Flag for Sunrise. By Robert...

London The night the war began, an ashen-faced woman in Parliament Square held up a photograph of an Iraqi soldier, reduced to a smudge of carbon but for his head and feet--an image from the last Gulf War. "He's the same age as my son. I put a lot...

Not since Jimmy Carter's confession that he had lusted in his heart after women other than his wife have Americans been so interested in the religious life of the man occupying the Oval Office. While pursuing the Republican presidential nomination...

Suddenly the sky is dark with chickens coming home to roost, and bedtime reading is Thucydides' account of the disastrous Athenian siege of Syracuse. Start with the amazed discovery of the White House, the Defense Department and the permanently embedded...

Beijing The pedicab driver stretched out in the passenger seat, his legs thrown over the bicycle seat, half dozing and half listening to the latest news updates in the hours after America began its missile strikes against Iraq. This image stuck...

You could have knocked CNN's Aaron Brown over with a feather. He seemed incredulous that within a twenty-four-hour period the Iraqi Minister of Information had thrown CNN out of the country (reportedly for being worse than the Bush Administration when...

Recently, Nilas Martins, principal dancer at the New York City Ballet, was stopped in Washington, DC, by gun-wielding policemen. They checked him out and let him go, but the incident prompted National Public Radio to seek the advice of Letitia Baldrige,...

Cairo My neighbor, who like many Egyptians prefers not to see his name in print, asked me about my nationality the morning the war broke out. "French?" he inquired hopefully. American, I told him. He made a playful grimace. The US-led invasion of...

Paris Following the first attack at 3 am French time, the morning papers were ready with generic "War Is Here" headlines, accompanied by full-page images of dark skies. During the day, France was reminded in the media by President Chirac that peaceful...

Berlin I came across a sign the other day, inelegantly scrawled on cardboard and stuck to a telephone pole. It read Fuck Bush. This was the day the United States announced there would be no second United Nations Security Council resolution. The...

New Delhi The Indian public has long been suspicious of the US arguments for military action against Iraq and the legitimacy of any "regime change" executed by a superpower with imperial ambitions. Indians strongly opposed the 1991 Gulf war and...

Jerusalem As I was driving home from work late Wednesday night, it became clear that the assault would begin within hours. On two radio stations the Home Front Command instructed the public to open their protective kits, offering tips on how to...

Amman The shockingly awful Anglo-American invasion of Iraq means that Jordan is now literally situated between two wars: To the west, the increasingly bloody Israeli-Palestinian confrontation is now well into its third year. To the east, indications...

In order to provide international perspective in the debate over US foreign policy, The Nation asked foreign commentators to share their reflections. This is the seventh in that series.--The Editors Dear America: This is a difficult letter to...

Mexico City "We have come to give flowers instead of missiles," a flower producer repeated, as he gave roses to the passers-by in the main square of Mexico City on Friday morning, hours after the US attacked Iraq. Seven hundred flower producers...

Lagos The gym is the last place to look for an impassioned discussion of global politics in Nigeria, a country that is currently pre-occupied with gasoline scarcity, rising political and ethnic violence, and anxiety over the April general elections....

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the University of Michigan affirmative action cases on April 1. In these cases, the white complainants argue that it is fundamentally unfair that Michigan accepts black applicants with lower SAT scores...

Manila When US and British forces crossed into Iraq at dawn on March 20, I was in transit from Damascus to the Philippines. At the Gulf city of Dubai, I bade goodbye to Maha, a refugee from Iraq who had fled Baghdad a month earlier. She said she...

Moscow A few hours after the United States launched its first missile attack against Baghdad, I spoke to 400 students and faculty at Moscow's largest university of commerce and economics. The mood in the packed hall was tense. My theme: the loyal...

Spring officially began on Thursday, March 20, but the first real spring day in Washington was Saturday, a blindingly sunny day, flowers just beginning to peek out, the National Kite Festival occupying four blocks on the Mall, the remainder filled...

Madrid The Spanish capital took on the air of a battle zone the weekend after the war began, as antiwar protesters clashed with riot police throughout the city. A bizarre scene greeted nighttime revelers moving between Madrid's bars and theaters...

Many pundits predicted that the peace movement would dry up once war began, and indeed polls show that American support for the war rose to as high as 71 percent after its launch. Bob Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches (NCC),...

The fierce tableau of smoke and flames that US bombs created over Baghdad--a visual message of America's awesomely destructive power--brought to mind Shelley's meditation on an ancient ruin, where a fallen pedestal bore the inscription: "My name is...

As the war began, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld promised a "campaign unlike any other in history." What he did not plan or expect, however, was that the peoples of earth--what some are calling "the other superpower"--would launch an opposing campaign...

Hanoi In this country, where a US military attack echoes more loudly perhaps than anywhere else in the world, protesters against the war are expressing themselves from Hanoi in the north to central Vietnam to Ho Chi Minh City to the Mekong Delta...

Chamchamal, Iraq I'm standing at the northern front in Chamchamal, a quarter-mile from Saddam Hussein's hilltop divisions. Before me six mounds of earth, like oversized anthills, line the ridge. This morning, US-led forces bombed each of them. I...